An everyday political economy of food insecurity in Myanmar’s Central Dry Zone

Abstract

Food insecurity is often highly differentiated within village contexts of the Global South. This paper argues that an everyday political economy approach provides a useful framework to account for such differentiation. We apply this approach in a rural village in Myanmar’s Central Dry Zone, utilizing a mixed-methods approach that incorporates (1) food security and dietary diversity indexes, (2) household interviews and (3) qualitative wealth rankings. Our analysis shows that patterns of food insecurity and diet emerge out of the conjuncture of everyday livelihood activities and political-economic relations between individuals and between social groups. Those who control the land of the village continue to enjoy better food security and diet quality above landless or smaller landowning households. However, the centrality of land ownership as an indicator of household food and nutrition security status is becoming blurred because of the increasing availability of non-farm livelihood activities. Differentiated opportunities for households to grasp non-farm livelihoods can sometimes challenge but more often reproduce unequal patterns of wealth and hunger. The everyday political economy approach brings into focus the lived experiences behind these processes of change, making visible the complexities of village life that are not able to be revealed in analyses dependent on socio-economic variables alone.